The Western Sephardic Diaspora

The western Sephardic diaspora was created by descendants of Jews who underwent forced baptism in Portugal in 1497, just a few years after the expulsion from Spain had brought a flood of Jewish exiles across the border. These conversos, many of them crypto-Jews, became known as the “nação” (“nation”), a term that conveyed an ambiguous identity that had made them targets of the Portuguese Inquisition. At first, some immigrated to Iberian colonial lands or fled to Jewish communities in Italy and the Ottoman Empire. By the mid-sixteenth century, some who were active in the expanding Atlantic trade began settling in southwest France as “New Christians.” In the seventeenth century Portuguese ex-conversos were able to build a thriving, openly practicing Jewish community in the Atlantic commercial center of Amsterdam. This became the hub of a diaspora that eventually included the Caribbean and the Atlantic coast of North America. Although some of its traditions have been carefully preserved, by the mid-eighteenth century this once dynamic diaspora had lost much of its commercial and cultural vitality.

Jacob Sasportas and Jewish Messianism

This chapter focuses on Jacob Sasportas and Jewish Messianism. A rabbi in the Western Sephardic diaspora, Sasportas emerged in 1665 as one of the few opponents to the Jewish Messiah named Sabbetai Zevi. In his response to Sabbatianism, Sasportas held up a series of texts as sources of authority to counter the immediate religious experience of the Sabbatians. He repeatedly emphasized an imperative to doubt and beseeched the recipients of his letters to question the certainty of their messianic sensibility. Documents, not enthusiasm, were what counted to him, and, according to the Jewish textual tradition, Sabbetai Zevi was not behaving as a messiah should. When the Sabbatians answered back citing sources of their own, Sasportas took a closer, critical look and proved them fabricated.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides a background of Jacob Sasportas. Around 1610, Sasportas was born in Oran, a garrison town at the edge of the Iberian Empire on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa in present day Algeria. The scion of a rabbinic family, Sasportas served the Jews of Oran and nearby Tlemcen as a rabbinic judge for several decades. In his early forties, he was exiled from North Africa for reasons that remain unknown, and fled to Amsterdam. For almost half a century, Sasportas lived among the Portuguese Jews of the Sephardic Diaspora. In 1665, he emerged as one of the few opponents to the provocative persona of Sabbetai Zevi, the self-proclaimed Messiah who became the center of a mass movement. From his temporary home in Hamburg, he conducted a vigorous campaign first to challenge and later to undermine the messianic claims of Sabbetai Zevi and Nathan of Gaza, keeping a meticulous record of Sabbatianism as it was occurring. This book asks why Sasportas would oppose a messianic movement and what the substance of this opposition is. In other words, it explores the truth-value of doubt within the rabbinic tradition as it was expressed by one man living in the midst of a maelstrom.

Exile

This chapter traces the life of Jacob Sasportas prior to Sabbatianism. It places Sasportas in a series of different contexts: a member of a leading Sephardic family in Spanish Oran, a corrector in the printing house of Menasseh ben Israel in Amsterdam, and a minister to the fledgling congregation of Portuguese Jews in London. In each of these contexts, Sasportas emerges as “a man against,” challenging truisms and opposing received opinions, even as he sought patronage from wealthy Jews whom he scorned. Sasportas's response to the different centers in the western Sephardic Diaspora—Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, and Livorno—was conditioned by the fact that he experienced them as an outsider. Much of this was a rhetorical posture. Sasportas repeatedly placed himself on the margins of the places in which he lived, even as the Jews in these cities provided him and his family with material support. However, his marginality was not only rhetorical; or perhaps the rhetoric itself bears close scrutiny. What few accounts remain indicate that Sasportas was perceived by others, particularly other Jews, as an outsider as well. Occasionally, this led to comity and a meeting of the minds. More often, though, this posture of the outsider led to conflict, and these conflicts frequently left a long paper trail—a paper trail that offers a perspective, however partial, on the Sephardic Diaspora in western Europe in the seventeenth century.

Crowds

This chapter assesses the doubt of an individual versus the certainty of the crowd. It posits that Jacob Sasportas's aversion to Sabbetai Zevi as the Messiah was as much a response to the force of perceived social chaos as it was an attack on the truth-value of Sabbetai Zevi's claims. Sabbatianism posed an acute philosophical problem to Sasportas. The certainty with which the Sabbatian believers propagated their newfound faith, the confidence and imperiousness with which they attempted to silence dissent, and their contempt for doubt as a condition for belief, all of these threatened the welfare of the body politic. Belief, or the acquisition of the correct opinions, could be cultivated and acquired only if the welfare of the body politic and the welfare of the soul had been adequately regulated. These intellectual and social demands forced Sasportas to draw upon the single most important resource he had in order to confer intellectual legitimacy upon his argument for the conditionality of messianic belief: Maimonides. As opposed to the collective need for instant certainty, he upheld the individual quest for discernment. Throughout The Fading Flower of the Zevi and throughout his long career in the Sephardic Diaspora, Sasportas consciously cultivated the posture of an articulate outsider. He saw himself as a figure of authority, the product of his lineage and his learning, who was quite capable of seeing the problems in Jewish society.

Monique R. Balbuena, Homeless Tongues: Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. xi + 239 pp.

This chapter reviews the book Homeless Tongues: Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora (2016), by Monique R. Balbuena. Homeless Tongues is the first in-depth analysis of contemporary Sephardic poetry, focusing on three relatively unknown authors: Sadia Lévy, Margalit Matitiahu, and Juan Gelman. According to Balbuena, Sephardic writers have often been marginalized even within the field of Jewish studies. Seeking to “observe the contours” of the multiplicity of Jewish literature, she presents Lévy, Matitiahu, and Gelman as examples par excellence of cultural, literary, and linguistic multiplicity. She argues that translation and the trope of linguistic dialogue between languages is the primary means by which the three Sephardic poets interact with majority languages and cultures.